RIGHT TRAINING: RIGHT PRICE The courses on offer at South Africa's Professional Diving Centre are hard to fault in terms of trainee facilities and value for money, believes Michael Cocks As regular UCI readers will be aware, I make a point of visiting overseas diver training schools and endeavouring to see if we can learn anything from them to improve training in the UK and to assess if their diving qualifications deserve HSE approval. For a long time I have been calling for a review of the way we train divers in the UK at Fort William and Fort Bovisand. I raised this at a meeting of the HSE Diving Industry Committee and was invited by Don McGregor, The Chairman of the Association of British Diving Schools, to attend their next meeting. I believe that not enough is done to prepare the student for work under water and to simulate working conditions. 12 days a group of PDC students displays a variety of helmets used at the school. I recently spent 12 days with Grant Jameson at his Professional Diving Centre (PDC) in South Africa. Grant has been diving for more than 20 years and for the last 9 years has been running commercial diving training courses - about one a year. Most recently, he has acquired the premises of the Professional Diving Institute in Durban, which had previously closed down. In the three months that he has owned the site he has done much to improve its facilities. His aim is to move from a quarry near Johannesburg to the docks in Durban where the school is situated; also to use a nearby deep quarry and the sea. A diving training vessel is on the shopping list too. I have never been worked so hard as I was by Grant; it reminded me of my square-bashing days during National Service. Potential trainees have to pass a fairly stringent swimming test. The days of their five-week Class 2 course (equivalent to our surface-supply top-up course - the old Part 1, which allows divers to work in the North Sea) often start as early as 7am and can go on until past 9pm. At present, they run for seven days a week, but students are likely soon to be given a day off. My training even involved a 2am start for the 400-mile drive to Durban. All students on the Class 2 course have to complete 35 hours under water over five weeks. A similar amount is required in Class 3 and 4 courses, which last for 8 to 9 weeks. Pleading I took part in a number of the underwater exercises and, after years of pleading and a number of work-up dives, was allowed to try to work at a depth of 41 metres. I had to swim 70 metres in a Superlite to a barge, then descend down a shotline with an instructor, Brendan Currin, to work for 20 minutes on a flange. It then took three stops totalling 47 minutes to reach the surface again. The students in Durban have to do this exercise at least five times, with each dive lasting 90 minutes, about twice as long as most dives at British schools. I have written before about the practice of taking off the shell of a Superlite under water. Here, in a shallow swimming-pool, three students pass the Superlite around and breathe in turn off the oral-nasal. Then, in a wet bell, three students have to take off each other's helmets and take it in turns to be the standby diver in an Exo mask. The standby diver has to ÒrescueÓ the other two divers who wear a band mask and Superlite - a none-too-easy task within the confines of the bell. At PDC students do more than 100 lock-outs, over five times as many as I did at Fort William. Grant has a wide selection of helmets, including a number of 27s. I dived in a variety of helmets including a Mark V standard helmet used at Pearl Harbour in 1943. The students sleep in containers with bunk beds, and at the Johannesburg lake some sleep in tents. This, in my opinion, tends to bond the students together and Grant, unlike at some schools, is prepared to fail a large number of students but always gives them some of their money back. He will also allow slower students to stay on longer and he does not charge them anything extra. Students are also trained on mixed gases, and a hands-on supervisors' course is run with potential supervisors running actual dives for students. I have long argued that this should also happen in the UK. Guinea-pigs Michael Cocks with British students Al Rumsby (left) and Mark Hawksbee in PDC's shallow pool I encouraged two British students, Al Rumsby, 23, and Mark Hawksbee, 25, to act as guinea-pigs, to see if I am right to claim that in many respects this South African training is better than that in the UK. After nine weeks at the Commercial Diving Training Centre at Cape Town they spent a further five weeks at PDC - the total cost, including the air fare and accommodation, will come to less than half that at our British schools. They will get in effect an HSE-approved ticket, allowing them to dive on the North Sea. I now have to convince the powers that be of the value of the training at PDC, as I think I have done with the sat training at INPP in Marseilles. It saddens me that I am not able to speak up more strongly for our two British schools, but I believe that they may not be giving the type of training modern diving requires. This is not entirely their fault - clients must tell them what they want. In South Africa the industry seems to take a much closer interest in diver training, and I was pleased to meet and dive with Robbie Duyts of the Department of Minerals and Energy, in charge of diver training standards. He has visited our two British schools and talked to the HSE. Of course, the price to a British student is helped by the current low level of the Rand but, even if the price rises, the intensity of the training would still make it good value. Looking ahead, Grant Jameson intends later this year to begin training saturation students and has already built an impressive saturation control system. He has invited me to take part in one of these courses and later to dive on an actual job, necessitating more than three days decompressing in a chamber. Military As I made clear at the IDSA meeting in Marseilles, I prefer diving schools to be run by someone with considerable commercial diving experience, and it is common for European countries to have only one school, run by a military head. Perhaps it is time for the (Royal Engineer/Naval) Defence Diving school at Portsmouth to begin to train a few civilian divers. Something badly needs to be changed with UK diver training, and here the employers must play their part. I have asked the HSE to clarify what course, for instance, a diver with a South African Class 3 onshore certificate needs to take to work on the North Sea. It is not simply a case of doing a top-up - much will depend on what he has done on previous courses. That is why it is vital for the UK schools to look closely at logbooks. If in doubt, a diver should check with the HSE and read carefully what is said on the ticket issued at the end of a British course. Details - Grant Jameson, Professional Diving Centre, PO Box 28409, Kensington 2001, Johannesburg, South Africa, Tel: +27 11615 6688 (or, for Durban, +27 31 205 8019). Michael Cocks (foreground) with other PDC students at the Durban quarry training site. Left: Michael Cocks with British students Al Rumsby (left) and Mark Hawksbee in PDC's shallow pool. Top: a group of PDC students displays a variety of helmets used at the school.

© 2002 Underwater World Publications Ltd.